During the eighteenth century, the Manchu Qing dynasty sponsored a major revival of courtly arts, which attained a new monumental scale, technical finish, and descriptive intricacy. A key figure in establishing this new court aesthetic was the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione. A master of vividly naturalistic draftsmanship and large-scale compositions, in Europe he worked as a muralist. Castiglione helped to create a new, hybrid Chinese painting style that combined Western realism with traditional Chinese conventions of composition and brushwork. The One Hundred Horses scroll is the one of Castiglione’s most famous paintings, and preserved in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.
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